Education in Carceral Spaces

EDU T010 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

Offered online only for residential HGSE students. What is mass incarceration and how does it relate to education? How do we conceptualize prison abolition? How can education as the practice of freedom (hooks, 1994) be realized inside policed classrooms? What is the purpose/power of formal education? Given that human connection is generally contraband in jails and prisons, and education is about connection, what is our praxis?  These are some of the questions we will grapple with in our course together. Our work will engage a range of disciplines including ethics, transformative pedagogy, neuroscience, and public policy. Our classes will often be held in virtual conversation with students and leaders who are currently and formerly incarcerated to listen and learn with people who are deeply familiar with cradle-to-cell trauma, systems of racialized punishment, and the possibility of the classroom as a kind of sacred/healing space. We will dive deeply into pedagogy and students will have the opportunity to develop a meaningful multidisciplinary practicum project.
 
This course fulfills the elective requirement of the Equity & Opportunity Foundations experience. Following the foundational learning in August Identity in Context courses, these electives build students’ historical and contemporary understanding, structural understanding, personal responsibility, and strategies for action.